In the related art, a fuel cell type two-wheeled vehicle that is driven by supplying electrical power generated by a fuel cell to a motor and driving a rear wheel using this motor is known. With a fuel cell system, electricity is generated by a chemical reaction between hydrogen, as a fuel gas, and oxygen, as a reactant gas, but methods of supplying hydrogen are roughly divided into two types for a vehicle fuel cell.
One is a method of installing methanol as fuel, extracting hydrogen from the methanol using a reformer, and the other is a method of filling hydrogen gas into the fuel cylinder in advance. Of these two methods, it is more common to adopt the latter system that does not require a large mass reformer as a fuel cell system for a motorcycle, which has restricted deadweight.
With the latter fuel cell system, a fuel cylinder filled with fuel gas and a fuel cell stack (or cell stack) for converting the fuel gas to electrical energy, constitute the main structure. Because the fuel cylinder and the fuel cell stack are heavy, the barycentric position is made higher due to the arrangement position of these components.
As a two-wheeled vehicle powered by fuel cells, Japanese patent 2001-130469 and Japanese patent 2001-313056 disclose technology where a fuel cell stack is arranged above a step floor below a seat, and a fuel cylinder is mounted above a rear wheel to the rear of the seat.
With both of the above disclosed related arts, there is a problem that as the fuel cell stack is arranged below a seat and the fuel cylinder is arranged behind the seat, drivability is impaired due to the fact that heavy components are arranged in a dispersed manner on the vehicle. Also, with both of the above-described related art technologies, since a fuel cylinder is supported above the rear wheel, there is a technical problem that the barycentric position of the vehicle body becomes high.
The object of the present invention is to solve the above-described technical problems in the related art, and to provide a fuel cell two-wheeled vehicle in which a fuel cylinder and a fuel cell stack are arranged so that the barycentric position is kept low and load is appropriately shared between the front and rear wheels.